A Milanese Photographer, a Grieving Elephant, and the Guardian's Best Photograph

The Guardian's long-running Best Photograph series turned this week to Federico Veronesi, a wildlife photographer who grew up in Milan and has spent his working life among African elephants. The image at the centre of the piece shows a grieving female carrying a stillborn calf. She held the dead animal for hours, Veronesi says, even though the calf was not hers.

His account, as the Guardian presents it, is a study in animal grief observed at close range. The same elephant had suffered a miscarriage two years earlier, and in the intervening period had picked up the stillborn babies of other mothers — a detail that gives the photograph its weight and its unease.

Veronesi's own history is the quieter half of the story. He dates his fascination with elephants to the age of three or four, in a Milan house the Guardian describes as full of objects that fed a child's attention. It is a familiar Italian trajectory in reverse: the formation happens at home, the work happens elsewhere.

The series works by asking photographers to explain a single frame, and Veronesi's contribution is unusually patient about the conditions of the shot. The Guardian's format lets him describe the waiting rather than the instant, which suits a subject whose behaviour unfolds over hours rather than seconds.

What the piece does not do is turn the photograph into an argument about conservation. Veronesi's subject is mourning, and the Guardian keeps its attention there — on the elephant's persistence, on the cross-species care that the image records.

For Italian readers, the interest is partly in the provenance. Veronesi is one of a number of Italian photographers whose reputations were made abroad, in the field rather than in the gallery, and whose work reaches Italy mainly through foreign publication. The Guardian's series is one of the routes by which that work travels back.

The photograph itself is now circulating well beyond the wildlife press. That is the effect of the format: a single image, explained by the person who made it, reaching an audience that would not otherwise encounter the behaviour it documents.